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a theoretical profit requirement. At least as important as these adjustments to fit the method to the
problem seems to be to always treat economic measures of energy loosely, perhaps true to scale but
read as if calculated to one significant digit rather than two or three.
Also needing further study, of course, is the real meaning of “average” as it applies to the embodied
energy of money, and of how to tell what kinds of spending are above and below average. We’ve
assumed world energy use per dollar to be uniform, so studies of the non-uniformities are needed.
Among other ways to study that is a network analysis of how money circulates. For example, if in a
month a person gives money to 200 different businesses, and each business receiving the income gives
money to 200 different people, then in three months there are 2003 × 200^3 partial recipients of any
dollar spent. That cascade results in 6.4 × 10^13 potential end recipients in three months. If you assume
there are 5 billion economically active people on earth, each one might receive part of a single dollar
spent three months earlier by an average of 13 thousand different paths! It’s confusing math, but may
be fundamentally important for understanding how our economies work, and how to measure them. A
network analysis examining the “degrees of separation” between energy uses communities that add
more or less value to energy, and add to the understanding of product space relationships and
community development pathways [35]. Finding how to reducing energy use without reducing comfort
is probably not done just by just changing one’s spending from one thing to another. It’s more likely
done by earning less but spending on things of more value, a cultural change.
- The Scientific Questions
The traditional method of measuring the environmental impacts of businesses appears to count only
the resource needs businesses record in the process of controlling machines and equipment that are not
self-managing. That has left uncounted the resource needs for supporting employees, managers and the
services they use to operate business. We showed one way to solve that accounting problem, but it
identified such a large discrepancy in results, an increase to five times the original estimate, that it
suggests there is something wrong with how the question was asked, a Type III error. In part that
prompted a change in our perception of money as a physical measure of environmental impacts, as
discussed in Section 4.3. It also prompts a question about how common it is that scientific models are
based on available information, instead of assessing the working processes said to be depicted.
That both professionals and the public appear to be quite unaware of the scale of energy use
required for common purchases. Simple conversions of the ratios of world GDP, energy use and CO 2
show that average expenditures like a $6 glass of wine consume the equivalent of 6 times the volume
of gasoline in energy and produce around 16 times its weight in CO 2. The decimal points matter less
than the wholly unappreciated scale. It exposes how our intuitions, and scientific explanations, rely so
heavily on the information at our disposal, and how that hides the dimensions and behavior of the
environmental systems we are part of. The implication is that we have a great need to begin getting our
information about whole system effects in some new ways, and other kinds of environmental models
may contain the same error of accounting for environmental processes as controlled by where we find
records of them, rather than by how the animating and inanimate parts need to work together.
The wider implications of changing any widely accepted scientific method or its use for guiding
world environmental policy, are well beyond what can be addressed here. So too are the wider